The Scopes Monkey Trial was the 1925 Tennessee prosecution of high school teacher John Thomas Scopes for violating a state law that banned teaching human evolution in public schools. Scopes was convicted and fined $100, the Tennessee Supreme Court later reversed the conviction on a procedural technicality without touching the statute, and the constitutional question at the heart of the case, whether a state could criminalize the teaching of evolution, was not resolved until the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a similar Arkansas law in 1968.
The Law Scopes Was Charged Under
The prosecution rested on the Butler Act, signed by Governor Austin Peay on March 21, 1925, and enacted as Chapter 27 of the Tennessee Public Acts. It forbade any teacher in a publicly funded Tennessee school or university from teaching that humans descended from other animals or from presenting any theory contradicting the biblical account of creation. A violation was a misdemeanor punishable by a fine of $100 to $500 per offense.1Tennessee General Assembly. Public Acts of the State of Tennessee Passed by the Sixty-Fourth General Assembly 1925 – Chapter No. 27 No jail time was authorized.
How the Case Was Engineered
The trial did not start with a defiant teacher. It started on May 5, 1925, at Robinson’s Drug Store in Dayton, Tennessee, where a group of local businessmen were looking for a way to draw attention and money to their struggling town. George Rappleyea, superintendent of a local coal and iron company, had seen a newspaper item announcing that the American Civil Liberties Union would finance a legal challenge to the Butler Act. Hosting the trial, he argued, would bring in reporters and spectators.
They needed a defendant. The regular biology teacher and principal, William Ferguson, declined. So they approached John Thomas Scopes, a twenty-four-year-old general science teacher and football coach who had occasionally substituted in biology. Scopes agreed, though he later acknowledged he could not actually remember whether he had taught evolution during those substitute sessions. The ACLU bankrolled the defense, treating the case as a vehicle to test government control over classroom content.
The Famous Lawyers
Clarence Darrow, then the most famous trial lawyer in the country, joined the defense without a fee. On the prosecution side stood William Jennings Bryan, a three-time Democratic presidential nominee and former Secretary of State who had become a leading voice for Christian fundamentalism. Bryan had not practiced law in decades, but he accepted the invitation of the World’s Christian Fundamentals Association, and his presence guaranteed national attention. The trial became a proxy fight over religion, science, and public education, watched and reported on far beyond Dayton.
What Happened in the Courtroom
The defense wanted to show that evolutionary science and religious belief were not necessarily incompatible, and Darrow’s team brought scientists and theologians to Dayton to make that case. Prosecutors, led by Tennessee Attorney General Tom Stewart, argued that expert opinion was beside the point: the only question was whether Scopes had violated the statute.
Judge John T. Raulston agreed with the prosecution. He allowed only one scientist, zoologist Maynard Metcalf, to testify before the jury before sustaining an objection and excluding all further expert testimony. The remaining witnesses were permitted to give statements outside the jury’s presence so the defense could preserve their testimony for appeal. The ruling gutted the trial defense while building an appellate record.
On the seventh day, with his expert witnesses sidelined, Darrow made a startling move. He called Bryan himself to the stand as an expert on the Bible, and Bryan agreed. Under questioning, Bryan said he accepted the Bible “as it is given there” but conceded that some passages were illustrative. Pressed on the age of the Earth, he admitted he did not believe creation took six literal twenty-four-hour days, describing them instead as “periods” of indeterminate length. The concession undermined the strict literalism he was thought to be defending. Bryan accused Darrow of trying to “slur the Bible”; Darrow answered that his purpose was to keep “bigots and ignoramuses” from controlling American education. The next morning, Judge Raulston struck Bryan’s entire testimony from the record and barred further questioning.
The Verdict and the Fine
With no expert testimony before the jury and Bryan’s examination erased, Darrow asked the judge to instruct the jury to return a guilty verdict. It was a tactic, not a surrender. Waiving closing arguments denied Bryan the lengthy summation he had been preparing, and a conviction was what the defense needed to file an appeal. The jury deliberated roughly nine minutes and found Scopes guilty. Judge Raulston imposed a $100 fine, the statutory minimum. Both Bryan and the ACLU offered to pay it.
Bryan stayed in Dayton after the verdict and died in his sleep on July 26, 1925, five days later. His physician attributed the death to a stroke.
The Appeal That Ended the Case
The Tennessee Supreme Court heard the appeal as Scopes v. State, 154 Tenn. 105. The justices upheld the Butler Act itself, holding that Scopes had no right to teach whatever he wished while employed by the state. He “was an employee of the State of Tennessee” working “under contract with the State to work in an institution of the State” and had “no right or privilege to serve the State except upon such terms as the State prescribed.”2University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law. John Thomas Scopes v. The State
But the court reversed the conviction on a procedural error. Under the Tennessee Constitution, any fine over $50 had to be assessed by a jury, not a judge. Because the Butler Act’s minimum was $100, only a jury could impose it, and Judge Raulston had set the fine himself. The conviction had to be thrown out.2University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law. John Thomas Scopes v. The State
Instead of sending the case back for a new trial, the court urged the attorney general to drop it. “We see nothing to be gained by prolonging the life of this bizarre case,” the opinion read, adding that “the peace and dignity of the State” would be “better conserved by the entry of a nolle prosequi.”2University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law. John Thomas Scopes v. The State The attorney general complied. No retrial happened, and the ACLU’s plan to carry the case to the U.S. Supreme Court collapsed. The Butler Act remained on the books, unchallenged in federal court, for another four decades.
What the Trial Ultimately Settled
Tennessee repealed the Butler Act on September 1, 1967. The following year, the U.S. Supreme Court finally answered the constitutional question the Scopes case had raised. In Epperson v. Arkansas, the Court struck down a nearly identical Arkansas ban on teaching evolution, ruling that it violated the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause because its purpose was to advance a particular religious view. A state’s authority over school curriculum, the Court held, “does not carry with it the right to prohibit, on pain of criminal penalty, the teaching of a scientific theory or doctrine where that prohibition is based upon reasons that violate the First Amendment.”3Justia Law. Epperson v. Arkansas, 393 U.S. 97 (1968)
The fight then shifted from bans to mandates. Louisiana passed a law requiring any school that taught evolution to give equal time to “creation science.” In Edwards v. Aguillard (1987), the Supreme Court struck that down as well, finding the statute “impermissibly endorses religion by advancing the religious belief that a supernatural being created humankind.”4Justia Law. Edwards v. Aguillard, 482 U.S. 578 (1987)
The most recent major decision was Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District (2005), in which a federal district court in Pennsylvania ruled that a school board’s mandate to present “intelligent design” as an alternative to evolution was an unconstitutional endorsement of religion.5Justia Law. Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School Dist., 400 F. Supp. 2d 707 The 139-page opinion concluded that intelligent design was a religious view, not science. Kitzmiller is a trial court ruling and binds only its own jurisdiction, but no school board has been willing to test the question again at that scale.
The Tennessee Supreme Court in 1927 answered the core question one way, framing curriculum as an employer’s prerogative. Every federal court to consider it since Epperson has answered the other way. The Scopes trial itself decided little as a matter of law, but it defined the terrain on which every subsequent fight over evolution in American classrooms has been waged.